Under the digital economy, the speed of product replacement is accelerating, the market demand is changing at the same time, and enterprises are constantly improving the efficiency of software development. In this environment, the emergence of low-code injects new momentum into the digital development of enterprises, releases the product design potential of the enterprise's internal business end, allows technical resources to be shared from the IT department to the business department, restructures the enterprise organizational structure in the form of "technology + business", and reduces problems such as long software development cycles caused by deviations in demand communication within the enterprise.
Low-code accelerates the integration of the digital economy and the real economy and improves the synergy efficiency of the industrial chain. The foundation of the digital economy is the digital element, and the application of the digital element enables the development of the economic system, industrial system and technical system in the digital economy and the social system to promote each other. In this way, it helps the real economy integrate industrial resources and digital elements, and helps enterprises solve "supply and demand obstruction".
Low-code, as a new tool to help enterprises in R&D and digital transformation in the digital economy, can break through the data barriers of various information systems in enterprises and give strong momentum to the development of industries and economies. Small enterprises in the industry can improve their digitalization level through low-code, which is expected to keep pace with the technical capabilities of medium and large enterprises in the future, improve the synergy efficiency of the industrial chain, and promote industrial intelligence.
Low code is the catalyst for the integration of digital economy and real industry
According to whether code is needed when building an application, low-code products in a broad sense can be divided into two types: low-code in a narrow sense and zero-code. Both of them can complete application building by dragging and dropping packaged code modules through a visual interface. Among them, low-code mainly serves the development department that focuses on business logic, and requires a small amount of code for module connection or function expansion; zero-code emphasizes the low threshold of low-code, and only needs to straighten out business logic to quickly build lightweight applications such as process management and forms. On the whole, the functions of low-code products are decoupled from the system, and the application scenarios are wider with the support of a small amount of code, while the zero-code products are lightweight and convenient, and the construction speed is fast, giving business departments more autonomy.
The form of low-code products has evolved from building process-based applications to mining data value, and has evolved into three forms. According to the underlying driving technology of low-code products, it can be divided into three categories: form-driven, model-driven and data-driven. Form-driven directly focuses on business scenarios, building applications with data tables as the core and workflow as the medium. Model-driven abstracts model building pages and business flows from business scenarios, and its application scenarios are more complex and extensive. Data-driven digs deep into the value of data on the basis of model-driven, summarizes and organizes data collected from the Internet and other software, and uses new technologies and algorithms to train and fit into an automated decision-making model. On the whole, low-code is progressing from basic forms to data-driven, and its functionality is gradually improving to cover more business scenarios.
**There is another important reason why low code is becoming more and more popular. Low code mainly reduces the total development cost from the perspective of software development cost and labor expenditure. ** From the perspective of software development costs, the low-code platform can be paid by subscription based on the year and the number of users. Developers call components on the platform to develop applications; they can also be customized on demand. Manufacturers differentiate pricing according to the complexity of the application. The cost of both models is better than traditional software development. From the perspective of manpower expenditure, the salaries of software practitioners in my country continue to increase, while low-code mobilizes the needs of enterprises for business personnel, improves labor efficiency through technology-enabled development, and balances the proportion of enterprises' salary expenditures for high-end, high-end and low-end developers. In addition, enterprises use low-code to shorten software trial and error time and overall development time, reduce the overall opportunity cost, and allow enterprises to devote more time and funds to capture new business trends in the industry.
In the process of enterprises embracing digitalization in an all-round way, continuous simplification of standardized processes and reduction of repetitive work are the core demands of the transformation of all walks of life in the digital age. This is also the value trend that manufacturers need to think about and empower. To grasp the trend of value growth, in addition to core product innovation, it is also necessary to optimize enterprise business development and service capabilities. For a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises, within the constraints of their own IT capabilities, how to integrate external service capabilities with their own IT systems to ensure the value empowerment of the enterprise's digitalization process is the next direction they need to think about. In the evolution in this direction, there will definitely be a place for low-code.